A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes by David Tanis

Author:David Tanis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Artisan
Published: 2013-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

menu twelve

hot day, cold chicken

Cold Pink Borscht in a Glass

Jellied Chicken Terrine

Turnip Pickles

Cherry-Almond Clafoutis

I suppose you can’t exactly call the chicken/egg thing a partnership, since it’s not exactly consensual. The particular genius of human intervention was to capture the birds in the wild and raise them for food—first harvesting the eggs while they were plentiful, then, as the flock aged, boiling the meat for soup and other dishes. If you had a few extra eggs, you made a cake, but eggs were considered a luxury.

But what began as a brilliant and perfectly eco-friendly tradition—keeping just enough chickens around the yard to supply eggs and meat for a small family—burgeoned into the big, hellacious business of factory farms, where chickens on drugs are confined in cages, lights blazing at all hours to encourage nonstop laying. This specter of avian enslavement—which produces eggs aplenty and inexpensive but bland, flavorless fryers—is enough to turn you off commercial birds (and their eggs) forever. And it should.

Just a few years ago, the only place you could find farm-raised chickens and eggs was at a farmers’ market, or on the farm. But conscientious cooks and consumers have lobbied to change all that. Now even mainstream supermarkets carry healthier, natural chickens and organic eggs from “happy hens.”

For me, the daily egg is a necessity. Some days, I’m convinced that sunny-side up eggs are the best; other days I want my eggs poached—perhaps for lunch in a red wine sauce.

Fried eggs have all sorts of possibilities. On a slice of bread drizzled with good olive oil, or on a plate of spicy spaghetti. Or my childhood fave, a version of egg-in-the-hole we used to call eggs James Cagney (for long-forgotten reasons), where you cut out a circle in a slice of bread with a water glass, melt some butter in a pan, lay in the bread, break an egg into the hole, then fry the thing on both sides. Or quail eggs fried and served on baguette slices with a drizzle of harissa for an hors d’oeuvre. In Italy, I was once served half a dozen fried quail eggs on creamy polenta showered with shavings of fresh white truffle. Utter extravagance. In England, I ate wild gull eggs with celery salt, collected by a licensed gull-egg forager. The yolks were a brilliant orange, and the flavor somewhere between fowl and fish (some people think duck eggs taste fishy too—others swear they make the best cakes).

For salads of every sort, the best accompaniment is a soft-centered, almost runny, hard-cooked egg.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.